Screenshot: A Weblog

I have been trying to get into the habit of taking a real lunch to work with me, and making up a batch of brown rice for the week that I can top with stuff seemed like a good idea - it would be filling and easy to throw together in the morning. Unfortunately, while I know brown rice is much better for me than white, I have not yet come around to liking the taste as much. So I decided I needed to make something aggressive enough to put on brown rice, while still being compatible with its flavor. I settled on making a spicy batch of vegetarian chili. Chili is fun, because I just go to the store and wander the aisles looking for stuff I want to throw in. Today, I ended up with:

• a large red onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, sauteed together in olive oil until well cooked,
• two huge carrots shredded finely, two green peppers, two "long hot peppers" (that is what the Giant Eagle called them - no idea what they actually were), and a cup of rehydrated TVP, all cooked in with the onion and garlic for about five minutes until softened,
• two cans of kidney beans, a can of black beans, and two large cans of crushed tomatoes, brought up to a simmer,
• a handful of oregano, basil, and chili powder, two handfuls of cumin, and about four chipotle peppers, after which the whole thing simmered through two periods of hockey.

The end result had a really nice texture (I chopped all my veggies very fine, and while I find TVP fairly flavorless I really like how it binds something like chili together) and a great flavor. It was also incredibly spicy; I have always associated chipotles with a smokey flavor, which the chili definitely has, and didn't think about the added heat. I don't mind, but this is definitely a chili to serve over something, not just to eat a bowl of plain. It also is an insanely huge batch of chili - I can never make a dish like this and not end up with enough for a week of meals and plenty to freeze. Fortunately, chili freezes wonderfully, and I am going to make up containers that I can thaw out and use to make up two or three lunches out of. Next time I would probably leave out the unknown hot peppers and remember to throw in shredded celery as well.

Posted by Amanda at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Coding Horror is often fun, and a good read, particularly for aspiring techies who want an inside glimpse of some of the details that would make up your life if you pursue that path. But when I read Jeff's post on spaces versus tabs in code formatting I both cracked up and immediately thought of one of my Data Structures students who has to reformat any piece of code he is given before he starts working with it. With my students deep into their team projects, I wonder if they are running into the conflict that Jeff claims is inevitable:

The only programming project with no disagreement whatsoever on code formatting is the one you work on alone. Wherever there are two programmers working on the same project, there are invariably disagreements about how the code should be formatted. Sometimes serious disagreements. The more programmers you add, the more divisive those disagreements get. And handling those disagreements can be .. tricky.

He goes on to discuss the pitfall of team members taking it upon themselves to "fix" each other's code - not just spacing, but even variable name conventions and the like. It may seem odd that such computationally trivial decisions (I mean, we all know the compiler doesn't care...) could cause so much interpersonal strife on a team. But if you've ever really gotten into programming, the idea that someone else might be messing around with your code, after you get it how you like it..... well, it is probably at least a little agitating. And Jeff cites the classic "The Elements of Programming Style" to illustrate that these style principles actually do matter when it comes to code as a tool for comprehension and communication. Which is particularly key on a team project.

In their book called The Elements of Programming Style, Kernighan and Plauger also identify what we would call discourse rules. Our empirical results put teeth into these rules: It is not merely a matter of aesthetics that programs should be written in a particular style. Rather there is a psychological basis for writing programs in a conventional manner: programmers have strong expectations that other programmers will follow these discourse rules. If the rules are violated, then the utility afforded by the expectations that programmers have built up over time is effectively nullified.

I am now curious to see how my students navigate this problem - if they try to get consistency or not, and if the most obsessive person in the group just wins (I fear I have one group with people who don't care that much and one group with people who do). And it makes me think about the style guidelines I set out for code in my introductory class, and that perhaps sharing some of this research would make it clearer why I have those standards.

Posted by Amanda at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Medical databases are one of the huge trends in IT right now, and there are a lot of people looking at how to make national, integrated personal medical information databases a reality. There are also a lot of people looking at the special requirements for accuracy and privacy when building such databases. I like this person's comments, from a patient's perspective, on the importance of sharing ownership of the records with the patient. The comments were triggered by someone commenting that they signed up for Google Health and found it to be a combination of inaccurate and with troubling omissions - basically, a health record that would likely be worse than nothing. The system is still in beta, but it is troubling to see partial data being provided by hospitals/pharmacies, as compared to simply declining to provide information unless it is complete. Even if this is improved, as it likely would be before it left beta and hopefully before any doctor relied on it as a source of medical information, the conversation about participation in the data collection and maintenance is a good one. It is troubling that any doctor would be wary of a patient seeing their own lab results, though perhaps they would like to be able to ensure that they are presented with enough context to be meaningful. But I think we have to insist that information about ourselves and our health is our information, and just as we have a right to see what is in our credit report and who has been looking at it, and a process for correcting it if necessary, we have a right to the same control over our health records. Given the nature of the information, I think we also need a system more effective than the current credit history system, and we ought to have it in place before these systems are widely adopted.

Posted by Amanda at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe the most interesting thing about this summary of responses to questions about the future of newspapers by a variety of newspaper and media experts is that they all urge newspapers to be very hesitant about reducing their number of print days per week, but they also concur that in ten years we will no longer have daily print newspapers. Common wisdom is that, at some point in the not too distant future, newspapers are going to have to leave their bulky physical form behind, but it seems that these experts think it is more important now to start reshaping the content and format than the frequency or delivery mechanism. It is also clear that the current model for newspaper success hinges on not alienating those who are still reading the newspaper more than attracting new readers.

This dovetails nicely with an article I read earlier in the week about proposed legislation to allow newspapers to go non-profit so long as they do not endorse political candidates, in order to help them survive. This legislation, it is acknowledged, is intended to help small community newspapers more than the larger newspapers that seem to be the focus of the discussion above. Allowing newspapers to choose to operate under the same non-profit umbrella as public broadcasting is intriguing - I suspect that the public broadcasting rules in part reflect the limited spectrum issues in radio and television and the merit of using some of them towards non-commercial purposes. It is intriguing to consider whether there has now been a flop, with digitization removing the spectrum issues for radio and television, but the increased presence of free, electronic sources of information putting a de facto cap on the amount of print media our economy can support.

Posted by Amanda at 1:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)